Just saw this last night at a FREE sneak preview. I love the free ones here on base- large popcorn is $3, Large drinks are $2...this is the way it should be!

anyway,

It was a pretty good film. There was a lot of humor in it & I'm just used to the more serious tone of the LOTR. This movie did a great job of "opening" things up & explaining the origin of things. In one of the LOTR movies, there's a brief scene where there are 3 stone trolls standing in the woods like statues. The scene where these the trolls get hit by daylight & turned to stone is in this movie. It was kind of cool to say "oh, THAT'S how those statues ended up there".

Ok, this is a good entertaining movie by just about any standard. "The Hobbit - There and back again" is yet another solid Middle Earth production with many highs and very few lows. It's maybe a little lighter and more child friendly when compared to the trilogy, but at the same time it doesn't avoid getting dark and fierce when called for, making it blend very well with the original style and tone of The Lord Of The Rings. And,.. Gollum absolutely steals the show! Best riddler ever!.. Fans of the original trilogy will likely only have very minor gripes with this prequel movie and only with very minor parts and details (if any at all).

For me personally, the only real downside of this movie was that I found the new characters to be somewhat less engaging than the ones we got to know in the Lord Of The Rings. I'm sure this is partly due to the fact that this is a (seemingly) more homogenous bunch of people, but it's probably mostly because of the fact that the script doesn't allow very much time to really get to know them all individually in this first part of the saga. I would’ve wanted to see a lot more bickering and fighting amongst the dwarves to create a more lively group dynamic. I know this is originally a childs tale but in my world a large group of dwarves equal coarse language and spontaneous buddy-brawls. I would have loved it if the only reason the dwarves were having trouble winning a fight was because they were too stubborn to get along. The same goes for the title character whom I also found to be a little too subtle and less colorful than I had imagined. I was picturing Bilbo as much more of a spontaneous, crazy fellow, cracking jokes all the time, but he just wasn't. I can also easily see how some of these factors could be viewed as positives by some.

I will catch the Enhanced version this thursday (Went with the Regular 3D today) to see how well "The Hobbit" stands up to repeated viewing and to make up my own mind about the pros and cons of the new 3D format.